Change initiatives fail first because of lack of clearly defined milestones and objectives

Change is a good thing. Companies that can drive changes successfully are the ones that are most likely to be sustainable. Now not all initiatives of transformation are successful. Organizational change initiatives have a spotty record: 50 to 70% of those are plain failures. To become one of the 30% winners and reach new levels of performances, the company needs to focus on two core factors:

- Clearly define the milestones and objectives of transformation to gauge progress;

Without those, as emphasized by The Economist: A change for the better, Steps for successful business transformation (2008) change initiatives within companies face great challenges and high risk of failures.

The Brook's law states that when a person is added to a project team, and the project is already late, the project time is longer, rather than shorter. Brooks’ law is recognized as applicable to any complex endeavor involving lots of people interacting together, not just software engineering.

I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all.

They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t ...